Friday Fun!

We had a busy day today!  This morning we worked on our class rules.  First we talked about why school is important, what our classroom needs to look like, sound like, feel like in order for everyone to learn, what each student think he/she needs to do to do their best at school and what each student feels like Miss Olson needs to do to help them learn this year.  From there we created our classroom rules:

1.  Be safe with our bodies and our words.

2.  Be respectful of people and property.  

3.  Do our best effort in everything!

4.  Have fun!

We have been talking about how important school is and that school is our job.  It's a student's job to do his/her best to work hard and learn and it is the teacher's job to do his/her best to help all students learn.  We say this together in class. "School is our job and we take it seriously."  We want to have fun at school, but also understand the importance of working hard and doing our best job.

Today we read a story called The Big Red Lollipop.  Ask your child what the moral/lesson learned in the book was.

We also learned and played the math game, "Addition Top-It."  Ask your child if he/she can explain the game to you. 

 

Finally we did a lesson on "fair."

If your child is still wearing his/her Angry Bird band aid, see if he/she can tell you what fair looks like in our classroom.

Today I asked each student to think of an injury either current or past that they had somewhere on their body.  I told them that I was going to give them a band aid for it.  Each student came up to me and showed me his/her injury.  I put all of the band aids on each student on the same spot - on their arm.  After everyone had a band aid and much confusion on their part, we talked about what had just happened.

I asked them if everyone got a band aid?  Yes.  So was that fair?  Yes.  Did where I put the band aid on help everyone?  No.  Was that fair?  No.  We talked about how in our classroom different kids are going to need different things throughout the year.  Some kids might need more help in reading or in math.  Some kids might need a different area to work in, some kids might not. I told them that as their teacher I want to do what is "fair" so that all students can learn the best that they can.  That might look different sometimes.  Just because I do one thing for one student and not another does not mean that I like some students better than others.  It means that I am doing what is best for that student.  So it's ok if things look different in the classroom for different students.

Ask them about the visual/picture we used with the three boys looking over the fence.  It helped to illustrate this point.

"Fair is not everybody getting what they want.  Fair is everybody getting what they need." 

Everyone worked hard this week!  Have a great weekend!  Next week will be another great week!